Shmup/shoot 'em up mini contest (was: Upcoming contests...?)

PowerMacX Wrote:There was an iDevGames project called "Incubator" that followed that "no competition" concept and... well... Let's just said it didn't get quite far.

Actually Inkubator did release their game, and then OS X came around and I do believe the people involved did not have the time to move it there, I'm sure their participation in uDevgames and commercial releases like Midnight Mansion took them away from the project that got no respect here.

Then the iDevGames site was hacked two or three times and every step of progress between the start of iDevgames and those hacks was removed and never put back in place.

dim3 stands as an excellent example of a "no competition" project.
147 or so users, all working together to learn game dev, with free software
made by one guy who never wasted time with an iDevgames contest.

If I incorporate crushing people into a game do I get bonus points then? Not than crushing people fits into my idea, unfortunately (and it's really someone else's idea, anyway - just modified very slightly for the ?00th time)

Josh Wrote:Actually didn't Inkubator do that penguin game? It was all Cocoa... but interest just slowly died out as some of the project leads dropped off the face of the earth.

Yes it was the penguin. It was cocoa?
When more than half the market hadn't switched yet.

Well interest certainly died on it, what with there being no tutorial for any of the noobs to get started to work on the thing and a game concept that died in 1981 or so. I know I tried to work on the project and just got lost, there was no "hey noobs this is howto start helping this project". No it was, go learn cocoa, come back and figure out this source code. There was no "Get creative, make a different game with your own sprites", it was "all the art is complete, go find another project until you learn to code a different game...that won't involve the Inkubator project"

Piss poor implementation of a good idea, doesn't make the idea wrong, it just displays the lack of forward thinking of the people involved.

Look at Will Hogben's Escort Wing. Its just a Shmup game, people played it, they start hacking it, his forum is strong with noobs who will someday be developers, without ever coming here to be harassed for not knowing Obj-C, C, the rest of alphabet soup of languages.

David's Lugaru, same thing. Dude had the longest iDevgames thread ever, and after leaving here he took his fans with him.

Had inkubator created the idevgames version of "shoot em up construction kit", it would have been used for this current contest, and the Carlosvision one too, and who knows how many others. Inkubator would live, but instead year after year iDevgames has a contest to produce more games that lock out noobs.

I still look at dim3 as the real Inkubator, it grew here, was disparaged by many, but it lives on and represents a good idea, implemented to the best of a developers ability, for the sake of new game developers, and not one persons selfish grab at "pride, fame, glory" or "excuse to make a game".

Oh and as I write this, Skorche is posting a shameless plug, go use some squirrely psychics and stop reading this rant. :-)

I have a shmup-kit to write, while writing documentation on how to build a shmup-kit, without knowing exactly how to write any of it. Fun!